Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia - Jurusan Antropologi ...

7
The new rich and cultural tensions in
rural Indonesia
Hans Antlöv
Studies of contemporary Pacific Asia have often been concerned with the
economic and political position of the new rich and the middle class. Within the
economic sphere, the focus has been on how the middle class contributes to the
development of the burgeoning Asian economies. Within the political sphere, the
focus has been on the emergence of a civil society and the middle class as an agent
of democratisation. In this literature, members of the middle class are seen as
representing a basically new development. Their emergence signifies the
breakthrough of modern society, whereby Asia will eventually converge with the
West. The modernity and morals of the middle class stand at the centre of
analysis, since it is inferred that a similarity in cultural tastes in East and West will
bring about the convergence of the two. The economic strategies and political
thinking of the middle class mark them off from the ‘non-modern’ layers of
‘traditional’ society. Everything new and good is credited to the middle class; what
is traditional represents peasant values and must be dissolved. In short, the picture
of the middle class is close to mythical: a vague and delightful cliché about the
modernity of the new rich, and not much more.
I believe this picture is too condensed, which is not to say that it is false. At first
glance, the lifestyles of the Asian rich look very similar to a modular European or
American type: mobile telephones, membership in golf clubs, lunches at McDonald’s,
shopping tours abroad. And the middle class has been imperative in the transition
to democracy: in Korea, in the Philippines and in Thailand. It is also the middle
classes that have been the promoters and beneficiaries of economic growth in
Pacific Asia over the 1970s-1990s period. But this is only part of the picture.
‘Modernity’ needs to be deconstructed and understood from within. Going to a
McDonald’s outlet or watching a Michael Jackson video are perhaps global and
modern events, but by looking at their internal meaning and cultural logic they say
just as much about the local setting of the new rich.
This is nothing new. The old Asian elites also maintained high standards of
living, often of European style: one only has to think of the rajas in British India or
sultans in Malaya who were often more Anglophile than their masters. Southeast
Asian nationalists in the early twentieth century were educated in Europe, they
wore European clothes, they adopted European ideologies of liber alism, socialism
and nationalism. Many twentieth-century nationalist movements demonstrated